To The Extreme(s)

Loud, weird, and sometimes packaged in an unpleasant manner

The term “extreme music” is an unsatisfying one. After all, there is no such thing as “moderate music,” is there? (Sorry to sound like Ted Gioia. I’ll stop now.) The real problems are obvious, or should be. First of all, extremity is relative. One person’s hellish noise is another person’s sound bath. When I was a teenager, I was forbidden to play AC/DC in the house because my mother found Brian Johnson’s high-pitched shrieks intolerable. He was too extreme for her. Meanwhile, Iggy Pop, who sang in a leonine baritone (this was around the time of Blah-Blah-Blah), was A-OK.

Secondly, tolerance sets in. Nothing stays too much forever. A short list of artists whose music was too much for me on first hearing, only to become favorites later on, would include Slayer (I was already listening to Motörhead and Black Flag, but Reign In Blood just sounded like noise to me when I first heard it in 1986), Albert Ayler, Merzbow (I mean, Merzbow is noise, but I learned to differentiate between his releases — if I had to pick just one, it would be 1998’s Tauromachine — and even saw him live once, with sax-sax-guitar trio Borbetomagus opening the show), and even Cecil Taylor.

The first time I saw Cecil Taylor live, at the Village Vanguard in August 1997, I was totally unprepared. It seemed to me like he assaulted the keyboard with neither plan nor goal for a solid hour, as his bassist and drummer struggled to be heard at all, never mind impose structure on the music. I walked out at the end of the first set (I don’t know how many there were, probably two and possibly three) literally shaking my head. Twenty-five years later, I love his music passionately, and am writing a book about him.

After that initial shock, I became a huge Slayer fan. I saw them live multiple times (once with Paul Bostaph on drums and twice with Dave Lombardo) and Reign in Blood is one of my favorite albums by anybody. I’ve grown to love Albert Ayler, too, and have spent many happy hours listening to music either in person or on record that many would call even more “extreme”: Borbetomagus, Charles Gayle, Masayuki Takayanagi, Kaoru Abe, Abominable Putridity, Malignancy, Orthrelm, PainKiller, Iannis Xenakis, and on and on. At this point, I doubt there’s any sound you could play for me that I would call “too extreme.” I might not like what I’m hearing, but I wouldn’t be thrown by it. I’ve heard it all.

So has Michael Tau, at least based on the evidence presented in his book Extreme Music: From Silence to Noise and Everything In Between, newly published by Feral House. The minute I saw this book’s title and its publisher, I knew I had to read it, and when it arrived, I dove in. And the first half is very interesting and informative; Tau writes about artists whose recordings break sonic limitations in all sorts of ways, from the “harsh noise wall” creators who release hour-long blocks of undifferentiated — but high-volume — gray static to the “lowercase” dudes (the overwhelming majority of musical extremity is produced by dudes) whose CDs are so quiet that the whirring of a Discman’s internal machinery, or the listener’s tinnitus, might actually drown out the music itself. He deals with conventionally understood varieties of “extreme music” like grindcore and ultra-offensive death metal, even surprising me by citing a piece I wrote for BA in 2013. He also talks about music that is extreme in its duration or its tempo, like Longplayer, a thousand-year composition by Jem Finer of the Pogues:

Longplayer achieves its tremendous duration through its simple yet elegant design. First, Finer recorded a piece of music that lasted 20 minutes and 20 seconds on Tibetan singing bowls. This was then digitally transposed to create six separate compositions, each one sped up or slowed down by a specific increment to ensure that it was a certain number of semitones above or below the original. All six compositions were then set to start at the same time, each one looped. Because of the way their durations are staggered, they will not arrive at their initial pattern of synchronization until a thousand years have passed.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Tau interviews artists who have made “micro-tracks” lasting fractions of a second — too short to even be processed by the human ear/brain. After about 125 pages, though, he runs out of sonic extremes to document (or just tires of documenting them), and shifts his attention to formats. The rest of the book is a catalog of all the weird ways people have chosen to release music in physical form, from lathe-cut records to 8-track cartridges long after that format’s commercial heyday to microcassettes to CDs packaged in ways that make the disc difficult or just upsetting to access, requiring the purchaser to fish it out of, say, a box of cooked and rotting pasta. He also includes things like Christian Marclay’s famous Record Without a Cover and the Merzcar (an undrivable Mercedes-Benz with a Merzbow album permanently sealed into its CD player), but one example I expected to find was absent. In 1984, the Arizona punk band Feederz released Ever Feel Like Killing Your Boss?, an album which had 180 grit sandpaper affixed to its front cover, so it would damage any record you filed it alongside.

I would have enjoyed a longer and more in-depth exploration of sonic extremity than Extreme Music offers. It’s an extremely (sorry) fertile area of research that demands real devotion to one’s task, so finding someone who’s up for it is exciting, and seeing them reach a certain point and then give up, when I know there’s much, much more to be documented and analyzed, is a little disappointing. And while the “fun with formats” half of the book is interesting and, again, well-researched, that too is only part of the story and could easily be a whole volume on its own. Still, given the general scarcity of any kind of scholarship at all in this realm, Tau’s work is to be celebrated. Buy it. (Before you balk at an Amazon link, know that I started at Feral House’s own website and they sent me to Amazon.)

Here are three “extreme” records that have landed in my own inbox in the past few weeks that you might enjoy listening to. I know I have.

Tomomi Kubo & Camila Nebbia’s Polycephaly is a series of duos for tenor sax (Nebbia) and ondes Martenot (Kubo). The ondes Martenot is an early electronic instrument played with a keyboard, or by moving a ring along a wire to create shimmering, wavering, theremin-like sounds. It has a long history in 20th century classical music, but most people are likely aware of it because Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead played one on Kid A and Amnesiac. Here, Kubo uses it to generate clouds of sound that seem to have their own built-in reverb and echo, while Nebbia shifts back and forth between softly muttering phrases in Spanish, almost too softly to understand, and harsh free jazz eruptions on the sax, occasionally clapping the valves but mostly sputtering and roaring. It’s a disorienting, even overpowering listening experience, but you may find yourself in a quite blissful state by the time it’s all over.

Teufelskeller is the self-titled debut by a Russian trio consisting of Anton Ponomarev on sax and electronics, Konstantin Korolev on bass and electronics, and Andrey Kim on drums. Ponomarev is also part of Massacre, a duo with guitarist Anton Obrazeena who were part of the Burning Ambulance Festival, a streaming online event held on New Year’s Day this year. Teufelskeller’s album consists of four tracks ranging between seven and 15 minutes in length, all of which are improvised in a jazz-metal-noise sort of way that reminds me of Last Exit, with a little less funk and blues and a lot more churning roar. Ponomarev’s saxophone is all long bellows and hoarse shrieks, in a post-Peter Brötzmann style, and Korolev and Kim are a thunderous free jazz/doom metal team.

I’ve been a fan of Dutch duo Dead Neanderthals for roughly a decade at this point. (Full disclosure: I wrote the liner notes for their 2014 album Prime, and they have an exclusive track on Eyes Shut, Ears Open: A Burning Ambulance Compilation.) They started out as a grindcore-influenced sax-drums duo, blasting out short pieces that sounded a lot like John Zorn’s PainKiller trio. But they’ve evolved in all kinds of wild directions since then, and there’s no sax at all on this new album, which consists of two 21-minute tracks of synth, drums and vocals (which go way beyond the vocal extremity of death or doom metal, to the point that they sound like recordings of a Rottweiler barking underwater). The synth is like a giant hornet that learned to play black metal riffs with its wings, while the drums are a relentless blast beat. So the whole package is kinda… Portal meets Krallice meets Suicide. Let it possess you.

Before you go, have some links!

• Work on my book In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor continues; if you’d like to support that project (including getting to read excerpts before anyone else, even my publisher!), become a Patreon supporter.

• I profiled jazz drummer and electronic musician Gerald Cleaver for Bandcamp Daily, getting his perspective on more than a dozen albums he’s made or played on; here’s the link.

• I also wrote about a fascinating album that investigates the work songs of Portuguese fishermen for Bandcamp Daily; here’s that link.

• I reviewed a bunch of albums by Eyehategod, Fishbone, Pantera and Suicidal Tendencies for the Shfl, which you can read here.

• A piece I wrote for DownBeat about Void Patrol (a remote collaboration between composer/percussionist Payton MacDonald, guitarist Elliott Sharp, saxophonist Colin Stetson, and drummer Billy Martin) has popped up on their website; read it here.

That’s it for now; see you next week!